Photography involves the recordation of visual images onto some form of tangible medium. Photography originally developed in the 19th century based on a discovery that light could alter the properties of certain photosensitive chemical compounds and thereby record an image on a glass plate or flexible film treated with such compounds. In the 20th century electronic image sensors were developed that allowed visual images to be recorded as electrical signals that could be stored on magnetic tape. Whether based on photosensitive chemicals or electronic image sensors, photography involves exposing an imaging mechanism to light for a sufficient period of time to record an image.
Developments in integrated circuit technology led to the development of digital image sensors and image processors small enough to be packaged a hand held cameras and even smaller devices such as cell phones. Such advances have resulted in the near ubiquity of digital cameras for photography. Digital cameras provide amateur and professional photographers with a variety of options for capturing and storing visual images.
One problem that has plagued photographers almost since the birth of photography in the 19th century has been that of posing subjects, particularly living subjects. Living subjects tend to move of their own volition and are, therefore, difficult to pose, particularly where more than one living subject is to be photographed in a single frame. In the 19th century, it was sometimes necessary to mechanically restrain a subject from moving during the relatively long exposure required for photographic plates in use at the time. Although the speed of photographic imaging mechanisms has improved vastly since the 19th century, living subjects have not gotten significantly easier to pose.
A common frustration to photographers of human subjects has been that of getting every subject in the frame to face the camera, open their eyes and smile. A common practice in both amateur and professional photography is to ask the subjects to say “cheese” or something similar in order to get them to open their eyes, face the camera, and smile. Even with this precaution, multiple images must often be taken until all subjects in the frame are properly posed for a “perfect picture”. This can be particularly wasteful of photochemical film since the film must be developed, and often the images must be printed, in order to determine whether or not they include a perfect picture. Digital photography techniques allow “imperfect” images to be discarded before printing. However, the recorded images must still be temporarily stored and reviewed to locate the properly posed image. For example, many digital cameras may operate in a so-called “burst” mode in which a number of pictures are recorded in rapid succession. The imperfect pictures may be discarded and the perfect pictures may be digitally saved in a memory stick or on a CD-ROM. Unfortunately, this technique has limitations, as to the length and number of pictures that can be taken due to the internal memory size of the camera and the transfer rate to external memory, for example, a burst mode of 2 seconds is typically not enough for posing of a group of people. Another problem is that in many cases, there is not a single “good” image amongst a plurality of images taken in “burst” mode.
Digital and non-digital cameras have used a “countdown” timer to allow a user of the camera to pose for a picture taken with his own camera. Although the use of such a timer allows the subjects a chance to pose, the actual recording of the image often comes as a surprise to at least some of the subjects, who are not properly positioned. One prior art attempt to address this problem, is to edit the photographs digitally after they are captured, e.g., using Photoshop from Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif. Another attempt to address the problem, known as MS Group shot from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., marks different parts of different pictures and allows a user to merge them together offline to form the desired picture. Unfortunately, such image correction is not automated and requires manual editing of stored photographs. Furthermore, making “perfect” photographs from two or more “imperfect” photographs still requires storage of both the perfect and imperfect photographs. Such solutions deprive the photographer of a “real” photograph and instead make up an image of a scene that never existed.
It is within this context that embodiments of the present invention arise.